Development of an angle of arrival estimation method for a 1090MHz ADS-B wide area multilateration augmentation system

Abstract

The previous researches illustrated the feasibility of wide area multilateration (WAM) using the differential time of arrival measurement in the ADS-B data link However the performance of the WAM system is degraded severely due to the insufficient ground station geometric distribution To improve the performance of the WAM the research presented a multi-measurement positioning simulation by adding angle of arrival measurement The contribution of this thesis is the development of a prototype of an angle of arrival (AOA) estimation system with a phased array for a 1090MHz ADS-B WAM augmentation system The system is implemented on Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs) platform In a multi-receiver system the device synchronization is an essential work to do An external time source is used to synchronize the device time in this thesis An approach for eliminating the initial phase of each receiver is also presented and conducted In soft-ware gr-air-modes a free software to decode ADS-B data is modified and implement on USPR platform to develop the AOA estimation system There are two AOA estimation algorithms and their simulation results with different parameter settings are presented in this thesis Practically the experiment is carried out to present the performance of AOA estimation system To promote the performance of this system a modified algorithm is also pro-posed and subsequently carried out Finally the improved results show the root mean square error of this prototype system to be 4 degrees in half power beam width

Date of Award	2016 Jul 27
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shau-Shiun Jan (Supervisor)